Monitoring Kubernetes in 2019 Will Get A Whole Lot Easier

In 2018, we saw a meteoric rise in the use of containers and
orchestration technologies, such as Kubernetes. As workloads are shifted on to
containers, DevOps teams are learning that legacy monitoring tools are not
suitable for this new deployment architecture. From lack of granular visibility
to the inability to handle ephemeral workloads, there are dozens of reasons why
legacy monitoring is not able to keep up.

In 2019, we predict that the move to containerization and
Kubernetes will gain further ground. As Kubernetes matures and gets further
adoption, we expect to see a number of trends in the new year:

Evolution of
Metrics and Events Observability: Growing deployments of apps on
Kubernetes will require advanced monitoring technologies to support both
metrics and events. Prometheus users will seek to complement Prometheus'
pull-based model for scraping metrics from endpoints with other means to
handle push-based events. Pull-based infrastructure metrics will be
contextualized by push-based events to deliver observability.

CX
Monitoring: Metrics and events will grow beyond monitoring infrastructure
and DevOps toolchains. The need to monitor customer behavior and usage
patterns will increase the need to monitor user metrics, such as
clickstreams, and weave them into infrastructure metrics to drive "aha
moments," like "my system usage went up 50 percent with a 30 percent
increase in placed orders."

Time Series
Platforms: As enterprise needs drive DevOps teams to look beyond the
capabilities of Prometheus, time series platforms will gain more traction.
DevOps teams will look at either complementing Prometheus with time series
platforms or replacing it altogether to gain high-availability,
fine-grained security and alerting.

The Rise of
Purpose Built: Organizations will increasingly look to purpose-built time
series platforms due to their ability to solve problems that require
specific storage, handling, querying, compression, etc. Band-aid
solutions, such as adding another Big Data platform to store time series
data, are not sufficient.

Kubernetes will not eat the world: Kubernetes
will gain ground, but there will still be workloads that will continue to
operate on non-K8s infrastructure. Monitoring teams will adopt time series
platforms that provide visibility into both K8s and non-K8s infrastructure and
deliver a single pane of glass for monitoring infrastructure, DevOps, IoT, etc.